Archive for July 2008

I wrote an article discussing Gentoo’s new release and new council for this week’s LWN.net. If you’ve read my earlierblogposts and other posts on Planet Gentoo regarding 2008.0, there won’t be a whole lot of new information. It’s designed as analysis of recent Gentoo events for people who don’t already follow Gentoo development.

If you aren’t already subscribed to LWN.net, get on it. It’s my #1 source for Linux- and open-source-related news, and it saves me huge amounts of time that I would otherwise spend in cesspools like Slashdot. =)

This is significant because the re-election was forced over miscommunication about a meeting, and this created some serious conflicts with a sentence in the Gentoo Linux Enhancement Proposal that created the current structure, including the council. I consider this a mandate, showing that Gentoo developers have confidence in the existing leadership doing what’s best for Gentoo.

This was your chance to say yes or no, and you gave us a resounding yes. Since it isn’t often we hear much from the vast majority of developers, this really means a lot to me in saying which directions we should go, based on who you voted for (graphs here). My interpretation is that you like what’s going on now and where we’re talking about going. I’d really love to hear more input from those of you who don’t normally speak up, though. What can we do for you?

Devs, listen up–voting closes for the Gentoo council at 23:59 UTC today (Friday). Here I’m going to tell you my surprise underdog picks. By underdog, I mean people who I didn’t realize I was going to rank fairly highly for before doing research. I dig through all my mailing-list archives of -dev, -project and -core, looking at all the recent posts by each candidate. Then I decided whether they expressed enough opinion on global directions, whether they were active enough on-list, and whether I agreed with their ideas about where Gentoo should go. Based on that, here’s my underdogs:

jer (HPPA arch team)

leio (wxWidgets, GNOME maintainer)

ulm (emacs maintainer)

dev-zero (cpp, postgresql, samba, python maintainer)

Other than them, I strongly endorse our QA lead, Halcy0n (also on GCC porting, toolchain, and C++ teams). I’m not listing anyone who’s been on the council before, because that isn’t as interesting. There are other candidates who I think have the technical qualifications–I’m not voting for some of them because I think having a strong community that follows and enforces its own Code of Conduct is not just important but vital for Gentoo to move down the path of greatness.

Last night, Dave Airlie released libdrm 2.3.1, which set the stage for all the pieces of the X.Org 7.4 prereleases to actually work (with a couple mesa patches). If you’d like to test 7.4, here’s how. This assumes you’re already running an ~arch (testing) system–if you aren’t, you might want to hold off on testing hard-masked packages. This may not work with binary drivers–particularly ati-drivers. It looks like nvidia-drivers has preliminary support for xorg-server 1.5.